In the Orbit of Genius

Genius comes at a price, and it’s usually those around the genius who pay it. Like a dark star, genius pulls people into its orbit, or sends them spinning off in unpredictable directions, or draws them down and consumes them. We are accustomed to thinking of talent as a creative force, but two new biographies remind us just how shockingly destructive it can be.

When Lucia Joyce was born in 1907, no one knew her father James was a genius. He was just a twentysomething layabout, an Irishman drinking away his exile in the Italian city of Trieste, scribbling unpublished manuscripts. Lucia took after her father: tall, pale and skinny. In Carol Loeb Shloss’s Lucia Joyce (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 560 pages), she emerges as shy but clever, a bright, pretty girl and a witty mimic. Lucia became a dancer. Her work was by all accounts strange and fascinating–“totally subtle and barbaric,” one critic wrote. But her promise was never fulfilled. As she grew from an adolescent to a woman, her life took a darker turn. She fell in love with a succession of men–among them the sculptor Alexander Calder and the writer Samuel Beckett–each of whom left her newly heartbroken. Although she was devoted to her father, she raged at the shadow that his growing fame cast over her ineffectual career, and she became increasingly difficult to live with. She threw chairs, lighted fires, cut the family phone lines, flirted with suicide.

Diagnoses–from a string of doctors that included Carl Jung–ranged from neurosis to schizophrenia to syphilis to barbiturate addiction to simple moodiness. Whatever ailed Lucia, it made her both impossible to live with and unable to take care of herself. She spent the last 45 years of her life in institutions, incarcerated and medicated, until she died in 1982. Shloss’s patient research expands what could have been a footnote to literary history into a tragedy of wasted promise. Shloss gives us a James Joyce we have never seen before, a portrait that encompasses both the great writer who subordinated everyone around him to the service of his art and the desperate, doting father who could never quite admit that his daughter was insane. The fragments of Lucia’s voice that survive come to us freighted with an almost unbearable sadness. Once, when her mother asked if Joyce should visit her in the sanatorium, Lucia said, “Tell him I am a crossword puzzle, and if he does not mind seeing a crossword puzzle, he is to come out.”

The facts of Sylvia Plath’s life are better known, but the story that lies behind them is no less mysterious. She met Ted Hughes at a party at Cambridge University in 1956. He was 25 and craggily handsome. She was 23, bright, pretty and vivacious–the word is hard to avoid with Plath. Both were aspiring poets. But Plath’s gleaming American smile hid dark, ravenous appetites–for food, for fame, for love, for sex. It also hid gulfs of despair; three years earlier, she had attempted suicide.

Plath and Hughes were wed just four months after they met, and the marriage burned fast and hot. Diane Middlebrook’s Her Husband (Viking; 361 pages) takes us inside the tight, intense feedback loop of two obsessive, competitive writers who read and critiqued each other’s work fresh from the typewriter. In time, the intensity turned claustrophobic for Hughes. He began an affair with another woman, and the couple separated. But in the agonizing aftermath of their marriage, Plath found a new and devastatingly powerful voice, the voice of “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy” and the other towering, terrifying poems that would become Ariel, the book on which her reputation rests. She became, as if refined by the pain, the poet she had always dreamed she would be. It wasn’t enough. In the small hours of Feb. 11, 1963, she set out breakfast for her two small children, then placed her head in an oven.

Plath’s story has been told many times–most recently in a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow–but Middlebrook’s biography is the first to draw on the papers Hughes left after his death in 1998. Her goal is to clarify his side of the story and to some extent to exonerate him. It’s an uphill battle. Plath could certainly be difficult, and unquestionably the presence of Hughes, a major poet in his own right, accelerated Plath’s development as a writer. But nothing in Her Husband will settle the question of whether Hughes exacerbated or merely failed to stem the self-destructive urges that finished her. What’s clear is that like Lucia Joyce, Plath was finally consumed by the dark star she orbited. But her story has a very different ending. Unlike Lucia, in death she eclipsed him.