B iographical research often leads to exciting discoveries, but despite great effort and expertise, it sometimes leaves unanswered questions. Either they’re too time-consuming to investigate fully or they’re simply impossible to resolve. In the course of my work on Somerset Maugham, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell, I have tried to solve several frustrating mysteries.
In 1962, when Maugham was 88, his last work, Looking Back, was serialized in the American Show magazine and the London Sunday Express, but was never published as a book. This bombshell described his daughter’s illegitimacy and his unhappy marriage to the fashionable interior decorator Syrie Wellcome. Friends like the politician Lord Boothby, the publisher A.S. Frere, Noël Coward, and Graham Greene condemned the attack on his living daughter and dead wife, and called it the ramblings of a senile, brain-damaged madman. I thought the brilliant memoir — in which Maugham, for the first time, dropped his cautious mask — contained many poignant revelations and showed his formidable satiric powers.
Only part of this memoir was ever published. After Maugham’s death, his heir, Alan Searle, sold the manuscript to a private collector, and it still exists. I was keen to see the missing and probably the most sensational part, and spent a lot of time tracking down the present owner in London. In the summer of 2002, I went to his house and rang the bell. When no one answered, I pushed a note through the mailbox. I then phoned him and mentioned several eminent literary friends who could vouch for my scholarly integrity. He rang one of them and absurdly claimed that my friend told him I was completely unreliable and that he should not show me the manuscript. I pleaded that if everyone had his costive attitude, biographical research would be impossible. When I rather desperately exclaimed that I’d taken a great deal of trouble to find him, he cruelly replied: “I curse the day you ever heard my name. I bought the manuscript for my private pleasure and don’t intend to show it to anyone. The answer is NO!”
In 1986, after lecturing in Reno, Nev., I met a graduate student named Len Sanazaro who told me that he’d taped but had not published interviews with Plath’s mother, Aurelia. He died young, and did not leave or sell his research material to the major Plath collections at Smith College and Indiana University. Nobody in Reno knew about the tapes, but I found out that Len was a friend of the deceased poet William Dickey. Through Dickey’s papers at the San Francisco Public Library, I traced Len’s tapes to his executor, a professor in Fresno.
In May 2013, I asked her if she had the tapes, how long they were and what they contained, if she would send me copies or allow me to listen to them in her house. I emphasized that I wanted to rescue this potentially valuable material before the tapes disintegrated and publish it with Sanazaro’s name as interviewer. I hoped, since her official title was “coordinator of research,” that she’d respond to my request. She replied that she had a pile of boxes belonging to Len and would try to look for the tapes or transcripts, and suggested I write again at the end of the summer. I repeatedly reminded her about my quest, but she never found (or perhaps never even looked for) those tapes. She ignored my increasingly urgent pleas, and I didn’t want to take the 360-mile round trip from Berkeley to Fresno without some assurance that she had the tapes and that they were still audible. I didn’t know if they contained new revelations or merely repeated Aurelia’s lifelong assertion, first proclaimed in her edition of Plath’s Letters Home, that her daughter was a happy and well-adjusted young woman.
The Canadian poet David Wevill was married to the German-Jewish and sexually charismatic Assia Gutmann. She fell in love with Ted Hughes, and their affair broke up his once-ideal marriage to Plath. Gutmann lived with Hughes and outdid Plath by gassing herself as well as their 4-year-old daughter. Wevill, who’d taught for two years at the university in Mandalay, Burma, spent most of his teaching career at the University of Texas at Austin. Neither he nor any biographer has ever fully revealed his view of the tragedy.
After I’d traveled to Burma in the fall of 2000, lectured on a cruise on the Irrawaddy River, missed my appointment with the Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi because she was arrested, and saw all the places where Orwell had worked as a policeman in the 1920s, I sent Wevill my article on Burma in Condé Nast Traveler as a way to establish contact. In 2010, I wrote again, inviting him to contribute to a book I called “Poets on Plath,” which was never published. He explained, with remarkable politeness, that he’d always avoided reading about and discussing Plath’s work, though it was often quite difficult to avoid the subject, and that he could find no useful approach to my project. He now felt too deeply implicated in the tragedy and had remained too intentionally ignorant. Though I had several friends teaching English at Texas, I never found the approach that might have changed Wevill’s mind.
The most frustrating search was for Lowell’s lover Mary Keelan, whom I thought I’d found twice. She’d been described as Irish, rather than Irish-American, so I tried to find her through the Irish Embassy in Washington and through my Irish friends. I searched for information about the philosopher and priest Ivan Illich and his cultural center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Lowell had met Keelan. I wrote to the author Jonathan Kozol and interviewed the professor Shepherd Bliss, who’d both been there with her. I then discovered that Keelan had become a librarian, and so I wrote to the American Library Association for which she’d edited a tape recording on censorship in the media. They told me she’d worked at a library in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and they forwarded my letters to her, but she never answered.
Thinking she might have done graduate work, I found that the Modern Language Association Directory of 1976-77 listed her in the Riverdale neighborhood of New York City and guessed that she might have studied at Columbia University. Their alumni association sent my letters to her, and she again failed to respond. But I was able to get copies of her letters to Lowell at Harvard, found out more about her from Ian Hamilton’s interviews (now in the British Library) with Lowell’s friends Frank Parker and Sidney Nolan, and discovered that she was the subject of Lowell’s 12 “Mexico” sonnets. Since she preferred to remain in the shadows, I never knew if she was dead or alive, if the wrong Keelan didn’t bother to answer my letters or the right one chose not to. Mary, please enlighten me!
In every case, after exhaustive research, I found the sources of the precious information I was looking for and almost reached my goal. But I was never allowed to see Maugham’s manuscript, hear Aurelia’s tape, or conduct the interviews with Wevill and Keelan. Biography is a cooperative effort. By explaining how I did my work, I hope some enterprising scholars, with better contacts and greater cunning, will follow these trails, solve the mysteries, and publish their discoveries.
Jeffrey Meyers is a literary scholar and biographer whose recent books include Remembering Iris Murdoch (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (Northwestern University Press, 2014), and Robert Lowell in Love (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). He can be reached at vjmeyers@sbcglobal.net.
