"As [Janet] Malcolm moves through drafty kitchens, Indian restaurants and train rides through the damp English countryside, she turns each biographer and figure in [Sylvia] Plath’s life into a character."

"She exposes the motives and agendas and prejudices at the heart of the Plath industry. She brilliantly indicts the whole enterprise of biography itself, comparing biographers to burglars rifling through people’s drawers.... She emphasizes the total impossibility of ever knowing the truth of another person’s life.... At one point, she gave the unfinished manuscript of 'The Silent Woman' to Philip Roth. He gave it a slashing edit, with often nasty comments in the margins. He violently disapproved of her putting herself in as a character. He hated her metaphors and accused her of intellectual shallowness. Another writer might have been crushed or paralyzed, but Malcolm simply addressed what she thought were the few useful parts of his criticism and put aside the rest. She scribbled playful and defiant responses to his edits in the margins: 'What’s bugging you, Philip? she said, with a sad shake of her head.' Later, in an unpublished interview, she said, 'I didn’t accept his dislike of the book.' Some of his crankiness, she thought, arose from being a man of the 1950s reading about the female experience.... To take this incident with equanimity, to not let it undermine either her friendship or her manuscript, requires a very expansive and shockingly healthy sense of self...."

Writes Katie Roiphe, in "Janet Malcolm Understood the Power of Not Being 'Nice'/The writer is remembered, above all, for her ruthlessness. But when I went looking for it, I found something much more complicated" (NYT).

"The Silent Woman" — commission earned — came out in 1995.

Have you ever endured a serious edit from someone you had to respect? Some writers fear even putting themselves in the position of needing to see one. Have you ever given one or offered to give one and had the writer miss what you thought was the chance to step up to a higher level? It's a painful process, editing. So says the blogger.

"There’s a part of me that doesn’t have anything to say, and so I try to festoon myself with things I think are interesting."

Said Jeremy Strong, quoted in "Jeremy Strong Isn’t Sure He Knows Who He Is" (NYT).

I put that quote in the post title because it had "festoon" and I'd just written "festoon" yesterday. A lot of people in the comments talked about "festoon," so I infer that you might want to talk about "festoon" again today.

The word began as a noun, and the original "festoon" was a garland of flowers. The etymology is "fest" (feast) plus the ending "-oon" (which is just an ending used way to make a noun). There are many words with "-oon," and I feel that a certain silliness is conveyed: balloon, cartoon, baboon, Brigadoon, doubloon, dragoon, lagoon, lampoon, maroon, harpoon, macaroon, pantaloon, saloon, saskatoon.... not to mention all the spoon and moon words and those outdated racial words quadroon and octoroon.

But the passage in the Jeremy Strong interview that I really wanted to highlight is this discussion of something in the book  "Diaries, 1898-1902," by Alma Mahler Werfel:

"All that drama!... I cannot understand why you do it."

Says Death in the Ted Hughes translation of the Euripides' play "Alcestis." Death is talking to Apollo about us humans:

As far as I am concerned, their birth-cry
Is the first cry of the fatally injured.
The rest is you — and your morphine.
That is what they call you the god of healing.
Life is your hospital and you call it a funfair.
Your silly sickroom screen of giggling faces,
Your quiverful of hypodermic syringes
That you call arrows of inspiration.

We went out to see that play yesterday in Spring Green, which looked like this:



The light through the reddish grass was lovely, but this wasn't one of the outdoor plays. We were indoors for this play...



... which is about a queen, Alcestis, who gives her life so that the king, Admetus, can live, in some deal that makes sense to the gods. Alcestis is the least interesting character in the play that gets her name, since it's established at the get-go that she's going to die, and she does exactly that early on. She's mostly talked about.

In fact, in the end, when — spoiler alert — Heracles brings her back from the dead, she's incapable of speaking for the first 3 days of resurrected life, and the play ends before that happens, so we never hear from her again. My favorite character was the king's father, who, we learn at the outset, refused to give his own life for his son's. The son is outraged that this old corpse of a man — as he sees it — clings to the meaningless shred of life he's got left. When the old man finally speaks for himself, he says just that: It's all he's got left.

Driving back home, (ad)Meade(us) and I talked about the play, and the phrase "death panels" came up. The son thought it was selfish and disgusting that his elderly father and mother wouldn't die. Quite apart from his need to have someone die for him, he had contempt for their attachment to worthless life. Of course, Death, quoted at the top of this post, thought all of life was agonizing drama, and the newborn baby's cry was crying at the fatal injury that is birth. All of life is a hospital, and you call it a funfair.

The suicide's baby commits suicide (at the age of 47).

"[Sylvia] Plath’s suicide in effect froze her children in time so that in the public memory they remained a one-year-old and a two-year-old lying in their cots, carefully sealed off from the gas leaking over their mother in the room next door. [Ted] Hughes did everything that he could to shield them from the increasingly lurid interest in their mother and did not tell them that she had killed herself until they were teenagers."

Self-murder and its aftereffects.