Biographies

Sylvia Plath Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts to middle class parents. Her father, a college professor, died when she was eight. She was highly intelligent, extremely compassionate and sensitive to everything and everyone around her. A perfectionist, she was very popular in school and a straight ‘A’ student. She was also an accomplished writer, having compiled an impressive list of publications by the time she entered Smith College in 1950 on a scholarship. Plath was to write more than 400 poems during her years at Smith. During the summer following her junior year, she went to New York to work as a student “guest editor” at Mademoiselle Magazine. Upon her return to Smith, she attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She later shared this experience in The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel published in 1963.

Plath returned to the academic scene following a period of recovery involving electroshock treatment and psychotherapy. Graduating from Smith with honors she continued her studies at Cambridge, England under a Fulbright scholarship.

In 1956, Plath married English poet Ted Hughes and settled in the country village of Devon, but less then two years after the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart. In 1960 she published her first book, The Colossus. Although the poems in this book were well wrought, they gave only glimpses of what was to come in the poems she began writing in 1961.

The bitter cold winter of 1962-63, found Plath living in a small London flat. She now had two children, was ill with flu and low on money. Her need to write increased by the hard turn her life had taken. Often writing in the early morning hours before her children awoke, she sometimes finished a poem a day. Plath found herself stranded in the physic wasteland that undoubtedly developed out of the death of her father. In these last poems, death became a force more powerful than ever and on February 11, 1963, at the age of 30, she killed herself with cooking gas…just a month after The Bell Jar was published.

Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published; followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and, in 1981, Ted Hughes edited The Collected Poems; Poppies in July was written in July of 1962. Plath didn’t consider The Bell Jar a “serious work” and published it under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.

“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream…How did I know that someday–at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere–the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?

- Sylvia Plath

Anne Sexton was an American poet born to a prominent Massachusetts family on November 9, 1928. Considered by many to be the greatest of the confessional poets, she battled depression all her life. The only daughter of an alcoholic father and apathetic mother, Anne showed signs of mental illness in elementary school; however her parents refused to seek psychiatric evaluation. The only source of love and companionship she received during her unhappy childhood was from her great-aunt, Anna Ladd Dingly.

Anne began writing poetry as an adolescent, but quit when her mother accused her of plagiarism. She didn’t begin writing again until after the birth of her second child.

Sexton’s poetry sprang from personal experiences and memories…in the process she dealt with deeply emotional and psychological matters. She wrote of repeated nervous breakdowns, “Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn” describes her stay in a mental hospital. Exploring childhood memories was the central theme behind “The Kite.” She also wrote often of her daughters, Linda and Joy, as can be seen in “Mother and Daughter.” Many of her poems were actually conversations with friend, Sylvia Plath. These poetic conversations dealt with her feelings on death and attempted suicides: “Wanting to Die” and “Starry Night.” Anne Sexton was also a very passionate woman whose desire for love can be felt in “The Kiss” and “When Man Enters Woman.”

Anne Sexton’s poetic career spans a short eighteen years. Her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (published in 1960), was followed by nine others. In 1965, upon the publication of her Selected Poems in England, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her third collection, Live or Die (published in 1966), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sexton was an expert on the human condition. She possessed a profound understanding of our suffering, but knew little of her own…she succumbed to her depression on 4 October 1974 and committed suicide.

Upon the death of her friend, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton wrote a poem entitled “Sylvia’s Death.” In this ode she referred to Plath as a “thief” taking the death that belonged to her.

Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr. was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 1, 1917. His father was an officer in the United States Navy and his mother descended from an old New England family. Educated in private schools, he had decided early on a career as a poet. He spent summers reading and studying the English literary tradition. Upon graduation from St. Mark’s, he attended Harvard, but left after two years to study with Allen Tate, a poet of the Fugitive group and a practitioner of the not-yet-institutionalized “New Criticism.” Lowell spent the summer of 1937 writing poetry and studying at the feet of the older poet. Instead of returning to Harvard that fall, Lowell transferred to Kenyon College, in Ohio, to study with John Crowe Ransom, Tate’s mentor. Lowell graduated summa cum laude in Classics from Kenyon in 1940 and soon married Jean Stafford, a writer of short stories and novels. 1940 also saw Lowell’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, to the chagrin of his New England Protestant family.

Lowell became a conscientious objector during World War II and served several months in jail (his experiences form the basis of “Memories of West Street and Lepke”). He completed his sentence performing community service in Connecticut. During these months, he finished and published his first book, Land of Unlikeness. During the next year he revised the book and published the new version as Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946. This work won critical acclaim and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947.

In 1948, Lowell and Stafford divorced and in 1949 Lowell married Elizabeth Hardwick, a young writer from Kentucky who was already established among the New York community of writers and intellectuals. In 1950, Lowell’s father died after a long illness. Lowell published his next book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, in 1951; however the book was criticized as Lord Weary’s Castle. He and Hardwick spent the next several years living largely in Europe, especially in Italy. These years saw Lowell suffering from a number of mental breakdowns, episodes of the manic-depressive disease that plagued him throughout his life. After his mother’s death in 1954, Lowell was hospitalized at a mental hospital in Massachusetts.

During the years of suffering and despair of the middle 1950s, Lowell found poetic rejuvenation in the work of William Carlos Williams. Williams looser poetic forms influenced Lowell to write himself out of the strictness of structure that characterized the poems of Lord Weary’s Castle. Counseled by his psychiatrist to write about his childhood, he published Life Studies in 1959. This work, a consideration of himself, his psyche, and his surroundings renewed Lowell’s reputation, winning the National Book Award in 1960. Though some readers, like Allen Tate, intensely disliked the new poems and found them both formally slack and personally embarrassing, many readers saw in the book nothing less than a shift in the American poetic landscape.

During the early 1960s, Lowell was energetically involved not only in poetic but also in political efforts. He befriended Robert Kennedy and Jaqueline Kennedy, as well as Senator Eugene McCarthy. He addressed, in such poems as “For the Union Dead,” the dreadful possibility of humanity’s nuclear annihilation and the miserable culture that endured and endorsed that possibility. “For the Union Dead,” became the title poem of Lowell’s next collection of his own poems (For the Union Dead, 1964).

In 1967, Lowell published Near the Ocean, but the work in which he was most deeply immersed during that year was the verse journal published the next year as Notebook, 1967-68. In poems whose form is loosely based on the sonnet (each is fourteen lines, roughly iambic pentameter, though most are unrhymed), Lowell recorded his reactions to contemporary events in the world as well as his thoughts on American history and his family. Notebook is the basis for the three books Lowell published at the same time in 1973: History, which includes some of the public-issue poems of the earlier book as well as a number of new poems; For Lizzie and Harriet, which includes some of the poems about his wife and daughter from Notebook and many new poems documenting the break-up of his marriage with Hardwick; and The Dolphin, which includes a number of poems about his marriage with Caroline Blackwood (they married in 1972). The Dolphin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

Lowell spent much of his last years in England with Caroline Blackwood and their son. He was on his way to see Hardwick in New York when he died of a heart attack on September 12, 1977. His last book, Day By Day, appeared in the year of his death. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death 1977.

BEGINNINGS

James Clavell was born in Sydney, Australia, on Oct. 10, 1924, the son of Sir Richard Charles and Eileen (Lady Ross) Clavell. He is a direct descendant of Walterus de Claville, a Norman adventurer who landed at Hastings, England with William the Conqueror in 1066. Clavell’s father was a Captain in the Royal Navy whose duty carried his family to a succession of Commonwealth port cities (among them, Hong Kong). After an education at secondary schools in England, he joined the Royal Artillery regiment in 1941. He was captured by the Japanese in Java in 1942 and spent the next three years on prisoner-of-war camps (chiefly at Changi, outside Singapore) where conditions were so harsh that only 10,000 of the 150,000 prisoners survived. He had decided on a military career when he returned to England as a captain in 1945, but a motorcycle accident, which left him lame in one leg, resulted in a disability discharge.

A NEW CAREER

In 1946-47 Clavell attended the University of Birmingham, preparing for a career in law or engineering, but after meeting his future wife, April Stride, an actress, he decided to become a film director. During the next few years he worked as a film distributer and made television pilots. In 1952 Clavell married April Stride (by whom he has two daughters, Michaela and Holly), and the couple immigrated to the United States in 1953 (becoming naturalized citizens in 1963). After some film production experience in New York City, Clavell went to Hollywood where he wrote and produced his first screenplay, The Fly (20th Century-Fox, 1958), a science fiction thriller. Following the success of the film (it made $4,000,000), other writing assignments came in rapid succession. He wrote Watusi (MGM, 1959), a remarkable remake of King Solomon’s Mines, and received a Screen Writers award for his collaboration on the screenplay for The Great Escape (United Artists, 1963), an account of Allied prisoners from a German POW camp during World War II. He was also coauthor of screenplays for 633 Squadron (United Artists, 1968), a World War II thriller, and The Satan Bug (United Artists, 1965), a science fiction film. From the beginning, however, Clavell aimed at the triple role of writer, director, and producer because he knew that “if you’re only a director or writer you have to explain things to the producer rather than say, ‘Do it.’” His first accomplishment in this role was Five Gates To Hell (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1959), a low-budget, high-box office melodrama about beleaguered medics in the French phase of the war in Indochina. In that instance , as Howard Thompson observed in the New York Times (July 2, 1959), Clavell made himself “a man to watch” by his moving treatment of material “that could easily have been outright trash.”

ONWARD AND UPWARD

As writer-director-producer, Clavell next made Walk Like A Dragon (Paramount, 1960), an offbeat Western; Where’s Jack (Paramount, 1966), about the career of an eighteenth-century highwayman (Jack Sheppard); and To Sir With Love (Columbia, 1967), based on the E. R. Brainwaite’s autobiographical novel about a teacher from British Guiana (Sidney Poitier) who wins the hearts of his problem students in a tough secondary school in London’s East End. Clavell and Poitier gambeled on the financial success of the film, contracting for percentages of the profits instead of large salaries. Their gamble paid off when the film (made for $625,000) returned $15,000,000 — an unusual gross for “a positive story,” as Clavell described the film. After the huge success of To Sir With Love, he hit another home run with The Last Valley (ABC Films, 1971), a film dealing with the Thirty Years War in Europe.

JOSS

Two chance factors had turned Clavell to novel writing. One was a Hollywood screenwriters’ strike that left him with some free time in 1960. Another was a sudden, inexplicable impulse to talk about his Chingi experience, previously “bottled up” inside him. At his wife’s urging, he began writing a novel about the struggle for power and survival in Changi, using himself as the model for one of the principle characters, British Flight Lieutenant Peter Marlowe, who has been educated to think that “trade” is reprehensible. The other (the title character) is Marlowe’s moral opposite, a pragmatic American Corporal who is able and willing to wheel and deal. The unusual friendship that develops between the two men and the repercussions of that friendship constitute the core of the story. When the novel, King Rat (Little, Brown Publishers, 1962), was published, reviewers took note of its power, sharp writing edge, tension of plot, fascinating narrative detail, and provocative analysis of right and wrong. He sold the screen rights and King Rat (Columbia, 1965) was made into a movie.

THE WRITER

In 1963, Clavell lived with his family in Hong Kong while he began writing his second novel Tai-Pan (Atheneum Publishers, 1966) which takes place in Hong King immediately after the ceding of the island to the British in 1841 (a period of opium dealing, trade rivalries, and the forging of a commercial empire). A highly plotted novel involving typhoons and piracy, action and sex, Tai-Pan, proved an enormously popular work, selling more than two million copies. The novel’s principle character, Dirk Struan, the first of the tai-pans (supreme leader) of the Noble House, the oldest and most important trading house in Hong Kong. Undaunted by obtuse and apathetic politicians back in England and by multiple enemies in Hong Kong, in China, and on the high seas, Struan builds the Noble House on barren Hong Kong as a future base for power in the Far East. Critics applauded the novels “energy and scope;” Time Magazine (June 17, 1966) referred to Tai-Pan as “a belly-gutting, godrotting typhoon of a book” (referencing the dreadful language of the time-period).

Clavell’s next novel, Shogun (Atheneumm Publishers, 1975), came from a sentence he spotted in his nine-year-old daughter’s history text: “In 1600 an Englishman named Will Adams went to Japan and became a samurai.” That tiny suggestion triggered a year’s research in the British Museum, visits to Japan, an three years in re-creating on paper a Japanese feudal culture encompassing all stratta of society as well as such extraneous elements as British colonials, Portuguese traders, Jesuit missionaries, and competing Japanese warlords. In the novel, the hero, John Blackthorn, is transformed from a lowly Christian “barbarian” captive into a true samurai (by Japanese standards, a man of strength, honor, and courage). As in Tai-Pan, the story is told through numerous fast-moving plots, violent action, romance (between Blackthorne and Lady Mariko, his appointed tutor), and assorted hair-raising disasters. The critical response of this ambitious undertaking is mirrored by the New Youk Times review (June 22, 1975): “Clavell has a gift. It may be something that can’t be taught or earned. He breathes narrative…Yet (Shogun is) not only something that you read–you live it. The imagination is possessed by Blackthorne, Toranoga, and medieval Japan…” The novel was a publishing phenomenon, with sales exceeding seven million. In September 1980, NBC presented it’s five-part, twelve-hour television adaptation (starring Richard Chamberlain) to a mini-series audience of 130 million (second only to that which saw Roots in 1977).

In 1981, Clavell published Noble House (Delacorte, 1981), the massive sequel to Tai-Pan. Of this work, the Chicago Tribune (April 12, 1981) said: “What isn’t in this novel, about which only terms like colossal, gigantic, titantic, incredible, unbelievable, gargantuan, are probably descriptive?” With it’s thirteen criss-crossing plots, teeming cast of characters, wealth of cultural details, and catalog of adventures and catastrophes, Noble House takes place in the short space of ten days in August 1963. It’s hero, Ian Struan Dunross, the twelfth tai-pan in a direct line from Dirk Struan, battles to save the company, now threatened with financial collapse by the machinations of Quillan Gornt (descendant of Tyler Brock) and by two American big-business manipulators. Intertwined with that warp of international finance is a story of worldwide political espionage. The Washington Post (May 5, 1981) wrote: “…storytelling done with dase and panache and as a rousing read it looms above most of the commercial pap published today.” In 1988, Noble House aired on NBC as a four-part, eight-hour mini-series starring Pierce Brosnan as Ian Dunross and John Rhys-Davies as Quillan Gornt.

Another work Clavell published that same year was The Children’s Story (Delacorte/Eleanor Friede, 1981) as “a gift to my adopted land.” The story originated almost twenty years previously, out of a conversation with his daughter, Michaela, who was then six, in which it became clear that she did not understand the meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance she recited at school. Set in an America that has been conquered by authoritarian enemy, it tells of a new teacher taking over a classroom and seducing the students from their allegiance to the flag, religion, and parents. When it first appeared, as an article in Ladies Home Journal, “The Children’s Story” drew a barrage of angry letters from readers who misconstrued it to be propaganda against God and country. Delacorte Press announced the publication of the story in book form with a publicity campaign calculated to avert a repitition of misunderstanding. In one stage of the campaign, James and April had dinner at the White House with President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan and presented them with a copy of the book.

Whirlwind (William Morrow & Company, 1986) was Clavell’s fifth novel in the “Asian Saga.” Set in Iran during the 24 days immediately following the fall of the Shah in 1979, it is the story of a British Helicopter company, secretly controlled by the Noble House in Hong Kong. The civil war that has resulted from the life-and-death struggle of rival Arab factions leaves a vast unanswered question: Who is friend and who is foe? The one thing known by all is the fanatical hatred of foreigners (especially Americans and British) that exists on all sides. For Andrew Gavallan, owner of S-G Helicopters, to leave Iran will result in financial ruin and forever end any chance of once again gaining control of the Noble House (which has been corrupted by the new tai-pan, Linbar Struan, who assumed power under questionable circumstances after the mysterious “accidental” death of David MacStruan — cousin to Ian Dunross and appointed by him to succeed him as tai-pan). Throughout this epic tale of war and peace, is a multi-plotted story involving assassins, spies, Khans, commandos, the KGB, bazaaris, Kash’kai tribesmen, mullahs, and the political and religious fanatics who relentlessly encroach upon the lives of the American, British, French, German, and Finnish pilots who find their lives caught in an uncertain balance of power and religious fanaticism. Sir Ian Dunross makes a cameo appearance as well.

Clavell’s last work, Gai-Jin (Delacourte, 1993), takes us back to Japan. It is 1862 and Malcolm Struan, grandson of the “green-eyed devil” himself, has become the tai-pan of the Noble House after the death of his father, Culum. The Japans are newly opened to foreigners (gai-jin) who are in constant conflict with each other as well as a nation that is on the verge of civil war. The struggle for power within and without the Noble House continues with the emergence of the fabled “Hag” Struan and the constant plotting of Struan’s archrival Tyler Brock. Of this epic, The New York Times (date unknown): “A grand historical perspective that makes us feel we’re understanding how today’s Japan came into being…absorbing…full of rich characters and complicated action.”

EPITAPH

James Clavell died on Sept. 6, 1994 in Vevey, Switzerland. In life he was a large man, over six feet tall, solidly built, with a thick chest and broad shoulders, ruddy complexion, soft eyes, and a healthy mane of grey hair. Interviewers have described him variously as exuding self-control and an almost “wheeler-dealer” self-assurance and as a gentle-voiced and deferential, with “a warm, friendly face that lights up when he smiles, which is often.” Jean Bernkoph, his editor at Delacorte on Noble House said he “was a dream to work with.” Clavell regularly wrote five pages a day on a manual portable typewriter. He never finished a day’s work without “knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow,” leaving himself at least a half page for that purpose. He never forgot his adoring fans, ever aware that it was they (us) who made him what he was: A GREAT WRITER and more. The dedication in his last published work, Gai-Jin, read:

“This novel is for you, whoever you are, with deep appreciation — for without you, the writer part of me would not exist…”