Love and Work: Three Biographies of Artistic Power Couples

Love and Work: Three Biographies of Artistic Power Couples Kristine Somerville (bio) Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage, by Diane Middlebrook. Viking, 2003, 361 pp. , 25. 95 (hardcover) Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century, by Stephen Galloway. Grand Central Publishing, 2022, 206 pp. , 30. 00 (hardcover) Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, by Mark Braude. Norton, 2022, 290 pp. , 30. 00 (hardcover) During the summer of 2007, I spent a week at the British Library combing through the archives of writers. One of my fondest discoveries occurred while paging through the folders of Ted Hughes, which offered glimpses of what it was like to be a writer in England during the postwar years. The country was still suffering the deprivations of the Second World War, and basic necessities were scarce and expensive. Hughes habitually used scraps of household paper for his writing-receipts, grocery bags, airmail envelopes, bits of wrapping paper. Even more surprising, poems and prose by Sylvia Plath, his wife and fellow writer, can be found on the flip side of some of his work. The opening page of Plath's lost last novel, Falcon Yard (which was to be a sequel to The Bell Jar), appears on the back of one of Hughes's animal poems. The paper I handled was often so thin, if I held it to the light of my desk, words by the two writers fused into an indecipherable amalgam of text. These remnants are evidence of a close creative relationship, and they symbolized to me the unique forms of collaboration that can sometimes develop between artists. Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage, Stephen Galloway's Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the End Page 187 Romance of the Century, and Mark Braude's Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris look at some of the most mutually productive artistic relationships of the twentieth century. They briefly recount the individual lives of the artists and then focus on their romantic and creative unions, which thrived, in one case for two decades, before flaming out from sheer intensity. The dual biographies offer insight into the life and work of these luminaries, capturing their temperaments, attitudes, and challenges, while also arguing that the couples were ultimately better artists for their partnerships, no matter how troubled or tragic. The authors prove that they were not solitary creatives but relied on each other for support, inspiring their partners to achievements they might not have attained on their own. ________ Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage Diane Middlebrook. Viking, 2003, 361 pp. , 25. 95 (hardcover) The marriage of Plath and Hughes is of enduring interest but, according to Middlebrook, too often misunderstood. In Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage, Middlebrook argues that in many ways, the marriage was a success. "They were so passionately in love, at the outset; they were so attuned to one another during the years they were struggling to turn themselves into artists, " she writes. Their art was mutually nourishing, and they "invested wholeheartedly in whatever the other was working on, even when the outcome was of dubious merit. " Middlebrook believes that each was the other's best critic and source of continued motivation. She begins the story of Plath and Hughes by reminding us that they were no ordinary artists. Before meeting in 1956 at a launch party of Cambridge's literary magazine, St. Botolph's Review, they had both already committed their lives to the pursuit of creative expression. Ambitious, idealistic, apprentice artists who had studied avidly the writers who flourished after the Great War, they had vowed to be governed only by their artistic impulses. While their union seemed improbable to their friends—his scruffy bohemianism the antithesis of her American brashness—the attraction was immediate; each poet could not resist the other. After their second night together, End Page 188 Plath planned their future life. She believed marriage to Hughes would transform her poetry. She wrote to her mother, "To find such a man, to make him into the best man that the world has seen: such a life. . .