There’s something about Sylvia Plath—the brevity of her life, the tragedy of her death, the haunting work she left behind. In the nearly six decades since her passing, she has remained an imposing figure in literary culture, romanticized and politicized and psychoanalyzed to excess. Plath’s relationship with English poet Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956, has also endured as an object of public fascination. Their partnership was tempestuous—strained by Plath’s mental illness, Hughes’s infidelity, and the demands of the writing life. Yet on the outside, they were two beautiful, talented writers, bound by love and poetry.
Dutch author Connie Palmen’s latest novel, Your Story, My Story, translated by Eileen J. Stevens and Anna Asbury, uses Plath and Hughes’s ill-fated marriage as a vehicle for larger questions about lust, loyalty, and grief. Palmen wrote the novel as she mourned her husband’s death, and explored her pain through the character of Hughes, who narrates the novel while grappling with the death of his own wife. Palmen, Stevens, and Asbury have achieved remarkable success in bringing Hughes’s literary voice to the page; reading Your Story, My Story feels like reading straight from Hughes’s diary. The prose is lovely, the emotions raw. But the novel’s existence also poses interesting ethical questions.
Originally published as Jij zegt het in 2015, Your Story, My Story is written from Hughes’s perspective, Palmen’s intention being “to tell Ted’s side of the story.” As a narrator, Hughes explicitly posits that he has been unfairly vilified in contemporary discourse (“She was the brittle saint, I the brutal traitor,” reads an excerpt on the front flap. “I have remained silent. Until now.”). This is possible. But Plath’s recently discovered letters, in which she makes allegations of assault and abuse against Hughes, tell another story. Jij zegt het was published before these letters were made public; still, what is there to be gained by ventriloquizing the dead?
Between Palmen and I there is a divergence of opinion regarding the ethics of this endeavor. The fictionalized Hughes condemns “the mudslide of apocryphal stories, false witness, gossip, fabrication, and myth” that shaped the couple’s legacy, but Palmen adds to this mudslide by producing a work of fiction that promises to deliver “the truth of [the Plath-Hughes] marriage” and “forever change the way we think about these two literary icons.” Turning a historical figure’s life into fodder for fiction is another form of speculation, but Palmen seems unbothered by the irony. And regardless of Plath’s credible allegations (the veracity of which Palmen doubts), the business of writing a whole novel to vindicate Hughes—who in the book weathers Plath’s erratic outbursts and volatile temperament with saintly patience—feels fraught.
Nevertheless, Your Story, My Story is an engrossing and often elegant novel. Palmen, Stevens, and Asbury replicate Hughes’s writing style with startling authenticity, and Palmen deftly draws out internal conflict in her characters. The premise may be questionable, but the craftsmanship is undeniable. I enjoyed the novel most when I read it as a mesmerizing portrait of an imagined relationship, rather than as an assertion of Hughes’s innocence or a historical corrective, as it seems marketed to be. I recently spoke to Palmen about her writing process, artistic choices, and stance on biographical storytelling.
—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor
Sophia Stewart (SS): Your very first novel De wetten came out in 1991. It went on to be translated and published in twenty-four countries, including the United States, where it was released as The Laws in 1993. Rarely do debut novelists find this kind of immediate international success. Were you surprised at all by the reception of your first novel? How did its success influence your writing and the books you wrote in the years after?
Connie Palmen (CP): It may, and most certainly does, sound arrogant, but I wasn’t overly surprised. I knew I had written a novel that was new and different, and that I wrote about a very twentieth-century coming-of-age of a woman. It has only been a short time since the search for identity has been regarded as not just a male quest, and in my novel this quest is also connected to knowledge, to stories. Women could recognize themselves in their struggle to learn and to find some kind of autonomy, and men would recognize their desire to define the world and the women in it. The novel has its roots in the literature of rebellions, as in the saga of Faust, who sells his soul to the devil to become a great artist. My main character Marie lets herself be defined by the men she meets till she has the courage and independence to tell her own story. A first novel is crucial, because it is an encounter with yourself as a writer. The book is a meeting, it discloses your style, your themes, your thinking, your idiosyncrasies, not just to the readers, but mainly to yourself. Only your first novel does that. From that moment on, you know.
SS: Eileen J. Stevens and Anna Asbury translated your most recent novel, Your Story, My Story, from Dutch to English. How would you describe the experience of working with not one, but two translators on this book? Did this experience differ from other experiences of having your books translated? What did the collaboration with Eileen and Anna look like?
CP: To me Eileen and Anna were one person. They worked independently, and only came up with a list of questions after the first draft. I couldn’t tell who was the American translator and who was the English one. They must have fought their battles about interpretation, significance, and what word to choose without bothering me, which is sensible. Translation is a creative talent. Of course I also find it hard to estimate the Danish, Hungarian, or Chinese translation of my novels, but somehow judging the English translation is the hardest. We all think we speak and understand your language perfectly, but we don’t. Eileen and Anna themselves can also shed some light on their collaboration:
We divided the text into four parts and drafted alternating parts, then exchanged the text back and forth a lot more times than either of us are used to doing with other translation work, while also reading and rereading background material on Hughes and Plath. Working with our mentor, award-winning translator Michele Hutchison, we sent her the crossover sections, asking her to tell us if she could spot the joins. Once we had worked through the whole text several times, we approached Connie with a list of questions, which she answered very helpfully, and then Connie and the series of Amazon Crossing editors each had further extremely valuable input, line by line, after we submitted our draft. Luckily, the person behind this project, Elizabeth DeNoma (who has since left Amazon), gave us ample time to complete this fascinating assignment. Our aim was to create a credible voice for Hughes while conveying Palmen’s incisive prose and her highly conscious use of vocabulary, with its echoes of Hughes’s poems.
SS: Seeing as Your Story, My Story draws from real people and real events, what kind of research went into writing the novel? Did you conduct any original research, or refer to scholarly work? In telling Hughes and Plath’s story, how did you balance historical accuracy with creative license?
CP: Original research is something a biographer does and has to do. My main interest is not to find historical truth, but to examine how others talk and write about you, and how this affects our lives. So for the novel, I could limit myself to the choir of voices—idealizing, disruptive, critical, apologetic, sentimentalizing—surrounding this couple, as well as the huge quantity of publications about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Then I made the artistic choice to write a monologue—to give a voice to the person that was written about in a slandering way for decades, and who did not defend himself, but remained silent. I made him a subject again, someone with a mind of his own. Whenever a person speaks, he speaks for himself, so the truth is his story, his point of view.
SS: The life of Sylvia Plath—always an object of public interest—has recently garnered renewed attention thanks to the recent publication of Heather Clark’s Red Comet, a definitive biography of Plath. Why do you think she has captured our imagination for so long? What is it about her and Hughes’s relationship that is so fascinating? What kind of reputation does Plath have in the Netherlands?
CP: Certainly I have read Red Comet; I recently wrote about it for a Dutch newspaper. It is as if the author, Heather Clark, had walked beside Plath every day of her short life. This makes for an impressively intimate biography, and Clark demonstrates convincingly that Plath was above all a writer. I found that moving. It is not easy to explain the worldwide fame of Sylvia Plath, though in the Netherlands she doesn’t have the same iconic status as in America. At the time when I wrote Your Story, My Story, Ted Hughes hadn’t even been translated into Dutch. I think Plath represents something complex in everyone’s life, but especially in a female writer’s life: the struggle between dependence and independence, between false and real, between symbiosis and autonomy. Her marriage to Ted Hughes is a mirror of this inner struggle—they both know the attraction of the extremes. I think that in the case of a suicide like Plath’s, the person has lost the ability to keep those ferocious contradictions and ambiguities in balance. Death wins.
SS: Your inspiration for writing Your Story, My Story was rooted in personal grief. Mourning the loss of your husband, you read Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters and saw in Hughes’s poetry the anguish he felt in the face of Plath’s death—an anguish you recognized. By probing Hughes’s experience of widowhood, you worked through your own. Can you talk about the process of writing from such a vulnerable, intimate place? Did you find crafting Your Story, My Story to be at all cathartic, or was it saddled with its own kind of pain?
CP: We, the melancholic, write every novel with a sense of loss and grief. When I was writing Your Story, My Story, I was still so much in love with my late husband, that I put all my useless, silly longing into the character of Ted Hughes, at the same time making him remember—with that craving pain of superfluous desire—the great and passionate love he had felt for his wife. Writing is the only way I can understand and endure reality, so it is not catharsis I am after—I just want to make sense, against all odds.
SS: Ted Hughes is the narrator of Your Story, My Story, and the novel’s prose captures his voice and style with remarkable precision. How did you approach replicating Hughes’s poetic voice and style?
CP: In writing you unwittingly expose your most intimate voice, your soul. It’s beyond control. By reading an author I can tell whether he or she is greedy, angry, jealous, cruel, narcissistic, tender, honest, dishonest. So by reading everything there was to be read by Ted Hughes—his poetry, plays, essays, children’s books—I could hear him talk and think, knew what was bothering him and what was making him happy. I did not have to copy his style and write exactly like him, to give readers the impression that they listened to his voice, read his thoughts, I just had to grasp his intimate voice. I wrote fully being me, to be understood like him.
SS: I recently read an excellent profile of American scholar and writer Saidya Hartman, whose book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, not unlike Your Story, My Story, fills in gaps in our historical archives. Hartman’s work considers the inherent limits of archival knowledge, just as your novel attempts to expand through fiction our limited knowledge of two iconic historical figures. Can you talk a bit about how you understand biographical storytelling and the role of fiction in working through history? How do you understand the ethics of fictionalizing real people?
CP: In 1988, I finished my study in philosophy with an essay about the death of Socrates. My thesis was that we get meaning in our lives through the stories others tell about us, but that those tales are as dangerous as they are enriching. In the end, Socrates was killed by what had first given him a name—gossip. He was made into a character in a narrative, which led to his death. How we are defined by stories, by fictions, is still my subject of study. In my novels I show the beautiful and dangerous ways fiction works in our lives. We fictionalize each other constantly, without being concerned about ethics. Take it broadly. When you are a man, a woman, Dutch, Black, narratives about how it is to be these things have defined you, even if you don’t recognize or acknowledge their influence. In Your Story, My Story I wanted to explore the awful, scary story that gets told about Ted Hughes—the story of the adulterous husband who murdered his genius wife. The life of Ted Hughes has been severely affected by the incriminating role he played in biographies of his wife. I found it to be pure horror. Biographical storytelling is a legalized form of gossip, that’s why we love it so much.
SS: Your Story, My Story was originally published in September 2015; in 2017, previously unpublished letters from Plath to her therapist were discovered, in which Plath alleges domestic abuse at the hands of Hughes. The letters contain claims of both physical violence and verbal assaults, which complicated previous understandings of the couple’s turbulent relationship. Had this discovery been made earlier, do you think it would have changed your approach to Your Story, My Story, which omits such allegations? Now that it has been made public, has it affected your perception of Hughes, or of his and Plath’s relationship?
CP: Every letter a man or woman writes after being abandoned by a loved one is written with vitriol, full of hatred and resentment. I have always mistrusted letters as a source of truth, especially those exaggerated ones written by victims. Plath’s excessive love had failed and her man and idol turned out to be human after all. She fell down from heaven into a cold, ugly reality. It has always been clear to me that the relationship between Plath and Hughes was impetuous and fierce, from both sides, and this was exactly what made their marriage interesting. They loved each other to death.
SS: Dutch-language literature is slowly reaching wider audiences in the US. Marike Lucas Rijneveld, a Dutch writer from Nieuwendijk, won the 2020 International Booker Prize, together with their translator Michele Hutchinson, for their debut novel The Discomfort of Evening. Rijneveld is the first Dutch author to win the prize and only the third to be nominated. Are there any Dutch writers you would like to see enjoy more international recognition?
CP: I would grant every original voice a worldwide public, so I will not throw out specific names. The world is big, and originality is rare, even in The Netherlands. I can only hope that every exceptional work of art finds its way to big audiences.
Connie Palmen was born in Sint Odiliënberg, the Netherlands, and studied literature and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Her debut novel, The Laws, was voted European Novel of the Year and was short-listed for the 1996 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2019, Vienna, Austria chose The Laws for their One City. One Book. campaign and gave away one hundred thousand copies to Viennese bookstore and library patrons. John Irving, Toni Morrison, Mario Vargas Llosa, Michael Ondaatje, and Hillary Mantel were some of the authors who preceded her with this prestigious honor. Palmen is also author of The Friendship, winner of the AKO Literature Prize; Lucifer; and the autobiographical novel I.M. Connie Palmen currently lives in Amsterdam.
Sophia Stewart is the assistant interviews editor at Asymptote Journal. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, and other venues. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she currently lives in Brooklyn.
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