The latest chapter on Plath
Sylvia Plath is to poetry as Bruce Lee is to the world of martial arts. Quite correctly, Ilana Trachtman's recently released Biography Channel film on Sylvia Plath notes that ''her death would bring more fame than she ever achieved in her life."
Trachtman's hourlong tribute to the Wellesley-reared, Smith College-educated Plath successfully navigates some of the trickier shoals of the young poet's biography. (Plath committed suicide at age 30 in 1963.) For instance, Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, is portrayed as a literary Lothario, but not as a murderer who drove his wife to suicide. That revision may owe much to Diane Middlebrook's more sympathetic portrayal of Hughes in her 2003 book, ''Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, a Marriage."
The movie even quotes University of Massachusetts professor Richard Larschan's controversial but accurate opinion that ''no one would be reading Plath today were it not for Ted Hughes." Although the philandering Hughes was vilified for much of his life as a wife-tormentor, it was he who arranged for posthumous publication of the gajillion-selling novel ''The Bell Jar," and it was Hughes who published the collection of poems that earned Plath a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1982. Hughes died in 1998.
Trachtman's movie functions as a class reunion for the not-so-large world of Plath scholarship. In addition to Larschan and Middlebrook, Smith College professor Susan Van Dyne puts in an appearance, as does Smith's Karen Kukil, editor of Plath's journals. Also heard from are Williams College professor Lynda Bundtzen and novelist Kate Moses, who fires off the movie's most memorable line, about Plath's commitment to domestic servitude: ''She out-Martha's Martha Stewart." That is possibly the first time those two names have been linked.
Trachtman has also dredged up some unusual footage of Plath's mother, Aurelia, with whom the poet had an intense, contentious relationship. In one memorable scene, Mrs. Plath complains about her daughter writing ''that stinking poem" -- ''Medusa," the poet's angry portrayal of her mother:
Off, off, eely tentacle!There is nothing between us.Like others before her, Trachtman limits herself to quoting tiny snippets of Plath's poems because the poet's estate, managed by her daughter Frieda Hughes, refused to grant Trachtman permission to use copyrighted materials. ''I got a very polite nod from the estate, but I couldn't use any photos or even quote from materials that belonged to them," Trachtman says. The estate went bonkers two years ago, when the British Broadcasting Corp. coproduced ''Ted and Sylvia," later released as ''Sylvia," a Plath biopic starring Gwyneth Paltrow as the sexy, suicidal Smith siren.
You can catch Trachtman's movie on the Biography Channel, April 22 at 5 p.m. It's a Literary Ladies' High Tea! At 4 p.m., Biography will reair its one-hour documentary on Jane Austen.
Wait, there's more
One of the big problems with Plath scholarship is that three widely separated university libraries have collections of Plath-iana: Indiana University's Lilly Library, where Aurelia Plath ''placed" (read: ''sold") some of her daughter's materials in the mid 1970s; Smith College, which acquired a vast trove of Plath's papers after her death; and Emory University, which owns the Ted Hughes papers. Now Kukil, the Smith curator, and Stephen Enniss, the Emory curator, have assembled a first-ever exhibit of ''letters, manuscripts, journals, drawings, photographs, and books that document [Hughes and Plath's] extraordinary literary development during the seven years of their marriage (1956-1963)," according to a press release.
It should be worth seeing, at New York's tony Upper East Side Grolier Club, for two months starting Sept. 14.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
