"Sweetly, Dirtier, Dirtier"

      Odd that I missed this: just prior to the auctioning of Joyce's letter to Nora, The Guardian did a nice little piece on the publication of the private materials (letters, diaries, unpublished manuscripts, et cetera) and the salivating prurience of some editors and academics who seem to think all such material their cultural entitlements.   After all, does it really help our understanding of Ulysses knowing that Joyce at least once referred to Nora as his "dirty little fuckbird" that liked "being fucked arseways?"   No, not at all, or, rather, nothing more than any reading of Ulysses itself would provide.   Similarly, the academics-- mostly of devoutly feminist stripe-- that still curse the soul of Ted Hughes for burning some of Sylvia Plath's private writings may, for all we know, be fundamentally misunderstanding Hughes and what he did; after all, there's much in Plath's poetry, and in Hughes' remarkably good Birthday Letters, to suggest that such supposedly-exculpatory material might lead to further misunderstandings of Plath and her writing.   I've always been of the belief that there is a fundamental difference between what a writer publishes and what he doesn't-- especially in this days and age in which publication is a much more "determined" thing (as opposed, say, to the various "floating" manuscripts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and such).   Every author, I think, is entitled to basic human privacy, to a life that is not their writing, even if "writing" is involved in that other part of one's life.   It seems discretion is an increasingly uncommon thing, a fact I can only lament.   I understand entirely why so many writers would want to insist on having their private materials destroyed.   I wouldn't want anyone poking and prodding through my life, either.   Would you?