I’ve found myself buried in the world of Sylvia Plath over the last few weeks. I was aware of the controversy surrounding her legacy – all the feminist fury at Ted Hughes etc. But I thought I’d never studied her poetry in any sort of depth. Since reading the latest (in what’s been a long line of them) biography I found a copy of her poem Daddy heavily annotated with comments like dominance of the father, rejection, need, inferiority complex, helplessness, deficiency, dominance of male over female , oppressed, alienated. It’s in a very old copy of The New Poetry edited by A. Alvarez. I have no recollection of having done this but think it must have been in the year I studied librarianship at RMIT before moving over to Melbourne Uni and Law. It obviously didn’t leave much of a mark on me.
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark
This new biography is beautifully produced, with this lovely picture of Sylvia on the front cover gazing lovingly at Ted who’s on the back. A famous photo. It’s also massive – 937 pages of text – which I think could easily have been reduced by a third. It was glowingly reviewed in the TLS and elsewhere. Although when I looked at more reviews, after my reading it, a couple of reviewers agreed with me that there was too much detail. Especially about her juvenilia – all of her early poems and stories both published and unpublished, and her boyfriends – gormless young men that they were. So many names, so much irrelevant detail – about their looks, families, backgrounds and sometimes even their futures! We get descriptions, seemingly, of every date she went on – what restaurants they went to and what they ate! She was a prolific diary writer. A pity really because Sylvia gets buried under all this detail and it’s hard to distinguish important people and events from insignificant ones.
This continues throughout the life story. We get names and potted biographies of people who had only the most fleeting interaction with Sylvia. Then even fuller biographical backgrounds of those who were important to her. Context is important, but reading a couple of pages of someone else’s life story it’s sometimes hard to remember the link back to Sylvia. Especially when we go back and forward in time. All up it was aggravatingly hard to follow.
Nevertheless I’m pleased I persevered. Clark’s objective is to recover Sylvia Plath from cliché and to debunk the sensational and melodramatic rhetoric that surrounds her. She wants this biography to examine her life through her commitment not to death but to art. And I think she succeeds in doing just that. The little that I knew of Sylvia was very much based on the clichéd version life story that commenced almost immediately after her death from suicide on February 11, 1963.
Clark is even-handed wading through claims and counterclaims. She notes Hughes derision of feminists who almost immediately adopted Sylvia as a role model for women seeking to live independent, artistic lives. Ted notoriously claimed she was Laurentian, not women’s lib. But this reading of the life shows that Sylvia was a feminist through and through right from the start. She bemoaned the double standards imposed on young women regarding sexual experience – the need for women to remain virgins until they married while boys could sow their wild oats. She felt completely betrayed by the fellow everyone wanted her to marry when he confessed to a sexual liaison while on his vacation from college. She set about remedying that disparity as soon as she could – with a somewhat alarming first experience of sex.
She was constantly faced with appallingly sexist attitudes that impinged on her self-belief as a serious artist. Amazingly for her time and place she recognised the injustice of this – others didn’t. And not surprisingly she resented it. She was ambitious and talented and, being a woman of her times, still wanted marriage and children. Unsurprising as this was the accepted role of women during the fifties. She worried about how she could manage this and still achieve artistic recognition. Clark recognises that Ted was in advance of his peers in helping with babies and housework and he certainly recognised and valued Sylvia’s talent. Still it was Sylvia who undertook responsibility for the running of their household. It’s amazing that she produced so much in such a short time. And it’s tragic that her depression was not treated successfully – another outcome of the times she lived in.
All of the significant events in Sylvia’s life – and as I said some insignificant ones as well – are covered. Stellar academic results followed by a disastrous early introduction to working life as an intern – at a much sought after intern at a prestigious New York ladies magazine – and her first suicide attempt at the age of twenty. This was a very serious attempt – overdosing on her mother’s medication and crawling under the family home, an effective hiding place because it was three days before she was found. She only survived because too many pills made her physically ill which in turn led to a dog’s barking finally attracting the attention of rescuers. Then followed the disastrous shock treatment that she remembered ever after. Flight to England, meeting and marrying Ted, poverty, a short stint back to America and then again to England and the snooty, hermetic, sexist, English literary scene. Babies then marriage break up. All the while writing, writing, writing – poems, short stories and novels. And aggressively seeking publication – for Ted as well as herself. It’s accepted by everyone, Ted included, that it was her pushing that led to Ted being recognised as the outstanding new poet of his generation. A recognition not afforded to her. Whilst many poems and short stories were published and she was invited to read, and speak about, her poetry on the BBC, she had to cope with rejection after rejection. As soon as she had something turned down she immediately forwarded her work to another magazine or publisher – she was indomitable!
Clark is very good on the poems – she includes so many I was sure she must have included all of them until I read Carol Ann Duffy’s book (see below) and found a couple for which there was no reference in the biography. Clark provides the circumstances in which poems, stories, novels were written and some analysis which is useful for the more difficult poems – although those that require elaboration are not my favourites. She rarely provides any of Sylvia’s poems in full, and I found it useful to look up the whole rather than just have excerpts. I found it a bit strange that she included the full text of some of Ted Hugh’s Birthday Letters poems. He wrote these over a period of 25 years but they were only published in 1998 a few months before his death. Clark describes an incident in Sylvia’s life and then includes Ted’s version of the same. Doing so seemed to give him the last word, which I resented. While Clark is even-handed I finished the book disliking Ted intensely.
Sylvia’s proudest moment in her lifetime was signing the contract for the publication of her book of poems, The Colossus which was released on 31 October 1960. According to Clark this included courageous poems for a woman to publish in 1960. Sylvia was disappointed in the book’s reception – there was only a small print run and whilst reviews were good, it didn’t elevate her into the stratosphere as her later work would. Her friend and strong supporter A. Alvarez wrote the most glowing review although even this was a bit back-handed: Miss Plath steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poetess. As another poet quoted in Clark says she got pats on the head for being such a good woman poet that you wouldn’t think she was a woman. Sylvia set greater score by American reviews of her work and it was to be a further two years before The Colossus was published there and then it was not reviewed at all to her great disappointment.
Whilst she was also writing and performing poems for the BBC and having poems accepted in various magazines, within her circle she was not fully seen as a serious poet. Often people didn’t even know she wrote – she was just Ted Hughs wife. This was not Teds view – he was always very supportive of her writing. Others perhaps didn’t see how driven and ambitious Sylvia was.
So why did she commit suicide? After recording the theories advanced by everyone at the time – Ted’s desertion, re-awakened memories of trauma during the writing of The Bell Jar, the prospect of single motherhood, being the subject of gossip and worse, pity, the terrible weather, lack of recognition for her poetry – Clark finally concludes the likely cause was just depression.
She notes the mis-steps by Hughes following Sylvia’s death that contributed to the backlash against him – redacting poems critical of him from the first version of Ariel that he published after her death; allowing the first biography by his sister Olwyn and Anne Stevenson who were both antagonistic towards Sylvia, and allowing Sylvia’s mother Aurelia to edit Sylvia’s letters in a way that presented only a partial, and misleading version of the life.
Having sought to provide a much more rounded view of Sylvia, recognising the breadth and depth of her talent, Clark concludes beautifully: The old comparisons to Medea and Electra no longer hold. If she must be a myth, let her be Ariadne, laying down threads, leading us out from the centre of the labyrinth. Let us not desert her.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath.
I took those concluding words to heart and full of admiration for Sylvia I wanted to read this, her only published novel. There is some suggestion she wrote another in her final months but it has disappeared (another black mark against Ted). I’ve obviously heard about this novel for years and don’t really know why I haven’t read it until now. Perhaps I thought it would be too grim. I was surprised to discover it at home; Eleanor having studied it at university. It was wonderful. I was reminded of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye which cast an acerbic eye over American life in the fifties through the eyes of a young man. This is a perfect companion piece dissecting that same culture through the eyes of a young woman. Just as devastating.
Sylvia wrote it in 1961; having contemplated writing about her experiences as a young woman for years. She didn’t sharing drafts with Ted, as was her practice with poems. He just knew she was writing something dark. It was published in Britain on January 14, 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Just a month before her suicide. It received good reviews but was not immediately recognised as a masterpiece which disappointed her enormously.
It’s enraging that it was rejected for publication in America during her lifetime because it was seen as unbelievable that a woman – based on Plath’s actual experience – would suffer a breakdown when nothing dramatic had happened to her! It was finally published there in 1971 and was an immediate success – with over 100,000 copies sold annually making a total thus far of nearly four million.
It’s a wonderful exposé of the double standards women faced and how they were treated in the nineteen fifties – and in many respects continuing even now. Beautifully written, I don’t know whether I enjoyed it more because I knew the real life story. She translates her own experiences into fiction without sentimentality or melodrama. She doesn’t fully expose the ugly reality but describes things elliptically which makes them much more powerful.
Her real experience attempting suicide at age 20 and subsequent treatment and people’s reactions are all here in the fiction but quite adroitly done. She was right to worry about its reception in the US as she based her fictional characters on real people; one of whom sued her Estate. It was disappointing that Clark didn’t go into that in more detail in the biography. It’s more directly relevant to Sylvia than a lot of her other digressions.
In any event I agree with Joyce Carol Oates, it’s a near-perfect work of art.
Sylvia Plath Poems chosen by Carol Ann Duffy
And so I read the poems, and found them much more uplifting than expected. This volume of poems chosen by Carol Ann Duffy is the only stand alone version of Plath poems that I have. Another indication that I have avoided her until now.
In her introduction Duffy says: she gives life back to us in glittering language – life with great suffering, yes, but also with melons, spinach, figs, children and countryside, moles bees, snakes, tulips, kitchens and friendships … she also deploys a comic playfulness, a real appetite for sensuous experience, a delight in the slant rhymes and music of her verse, bravado, brio, a tangible joy in the unflowering of her genius.
I think it’s a pity she is known mostly for the darker poems, including those in Ariel written just before her death. They are recognised as forging a new poetic paradigm – so-called confessional poetry. Which is all to the good, but the focus on Lady Lazarus and Daddy and the need to psycho-analyse their meaning have led to the cliché repeated by Anne Stevenson in the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English that Plath defines a nihilistic metaphysic from which death provided the only dignified escape. Looking at the totality of her work that’s rubbish!
Ted Hughes found the Ariel poems on her desk after her death and published them in 1965 – leaving out those most critical of him, and re-arranging their order, which Clark says made the volume darker and less hopeful than Sylvia’s arrangement of them. It was an immediate success. Some 15,000 copies were sold in 10 months. He subsequently edited and published a volume of Collected Poems which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.
It’s such a tragedy that Sylvia didn’t get to see this acclaim. And had she lived she would have been judged and remembered for the totality of the work – much of which is glowing with life as Duffy notes. While I don’t have any the three Plath volumes, I do have lots of anthologies and I found it interesting to check which of her poems included.
The New Poetry edited by A. Alvarez was first published in 1962 without any of Sylvia’s poems, but including some of Hughes. Alvarez published a revised edition in 1964 after her death that included seven – Lady Lazarus, Daddy, The Moon and the Yew Tree, The Arrival of the Bee Box, The Swarm, Childless Woman and Mary’s Song. Alvarez expresses incredulity that Sylvia’s poems were not included in a contemporaneous Penguin anthology of contemporary American verse. He goes on to say in his preface: Ideally, I would have wished to include far more of Sylvia Plath’s poems, but her literary executors (i.e. Ted) felt, reasonably enough, that this might interfere with the sale of her first posthumous collection, Ariel. Four of these poems are from Ariel and another three had not yet been published.
The Faber Book of Modern Verse published in 1965 includes Mirror, a wonderfully inventive poem from the viewpoint of a mirror which I talk about below; and Death & Co., which as the title suggest is much darker!
The Penguin Book of Women Poets published in 1978 includes Nick and the Candlestick, a beautiful poem to her son, Ariel and Child another poem dedicated to NIck which I include in full below.
101 Poems by 101 Women published in 2001 contains poems chosen by Germaine Greer and is a wonderful anthology. She allows only one poem per poet and I was interested that of all of Sylvia’s poems she chose Colossus for inclusion. It’s about her father: Thirty years now I have labored / To dredge the silt from your throat. / I am none the wiser.
Duffy asks that her volume be read alongside the Collected Poems. In her selection she has placed the poems in order of their composition and I was surprised to find that some of the early ones are not included in Red Comet. I like a lot of them very much indeed and have looked them up in the biography. So here are a few of them with the date she wrote them in brackets. Let’s appreciate Sylvia for her art.
November Graveyard (September 1956) – describes a graveyard near Teds home on the Yorkshire moors – where she would be subsequently buried. At the essential landscape stare, stare / Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: / Whatever lost ghosts flare, / Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor / Rave on the leash of the starving mind / Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.
Hardcastle Crags (1957) – set in those same moors where a lone woman walks alone in the dark, confronting landscape. All the night gave her, in return / For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat / Of her heart, was the humped indifferent iron / Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set / On black stone. Barns / Guarded broods and litters / Behind shut doors; the dairy herds / Knelt in the meadow mute as boulders; / Sheep drowsed stoneward in their tussocks of wool, and birds, / Twig-sleeping, wore / Granite ruffs, their shadows / The guise of leaves …The whole landscape / Loomed absolute as the antique world was / Once, in its earliest sway of lymph and sap, / Unaltered by eyes, / Enough to snuff the quick / Of her small heat out, / before the weight / Of stones and hills of stones could break / Her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light / She turned back.
The Manor Garden (1959) – written while she was pregnant and expressing her wonder at the growing baby. … Your day approaches. The pears fatten like little buddhas. / A blue mist is dragging the lake. / You move through the era of fishes, / The smug centuries of the pig – / Head, toe and finger / Come clear in the shadow….
Magi and Candles (October 1960) – both inspired by her daughter and gentle, life seen through a soft golden light. From Magi: Six months in the world, and she is able / To rock on all fours like a padded hammock. / For her, the heavy notion of Evil / Attending her cot is less than a belly ache, / And Love the mother of milk, no theory. From Candles: These little globes of light are sweet as pears, / Kindly with invalids and mawkish women, / … The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open. / In twenty years I shall be retrograde / As these draughty ephemerids / I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls. / How shall I tell anything at all / To this infant still in a birth-drowse? / Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her, / The shadows stoop over like guests at a christening.
Morning Song (1960) – another about birth and caring for a newborn; beautifully expressed. Love set you going like a fat gold watch. / The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry / Took its place among the elements. / Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. / In a drafty museum, your nakedness / Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls …All night your moth-breath / Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear. / One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown. / Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square / Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try / Your handful of notes; / The clear vowels rise like balloons.
Tulips (March 1961) – is about her experience in hospital having her appendix out and contrasts the peaceful time she had initially until she was given a bunch of tulips. The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. / Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. / I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly / As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. / I am nobody: I have nothing to do with explosions. / I have given my name and my day-clothes to the nurses / And my history to the anesthetist and my body to the surgeons. ….. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. /… The tulips are too red …Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds / They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, / Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck …
Wuthering Heights (September 1961) – describing the abandoned farmhouse, Top Withens, purportedly the house in the novel, near Teds Yorkshire home. Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass; / Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves. / Of people the air only / Remembers a few odd syllables. / It rehearses them meaningly: / Black stone, black stone. …
Last Words, and The Moon and the Yew Tree (September – October 1961 – are both a bit darker, said, by Clark to be descriptive of depression. Last Words: I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus / With tigery stripes, and a face on it / Round as the moon, to stare up. … They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart / Under my feet in a neat parcel. / I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark, / And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar. The Moon and the Yew Tree was apparently suggested by Ted as an exercise to help her mood; the tree being just outside the room in which she was writing. This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. / The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God, / Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. / Fumy, spiritous mist inhabit this place / Separated from my house by a row of headstones. I simply cannot see where there is to get to. / … The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape. / The eyes lift after it and find the moon. / The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. …
Mirror (1961) – a clever take on what a mirror sees. I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. / I am not cruel, only truthful – / The eye of a little god, four-cornered. / … A woman bends over me, / Searching my reaches for what she really is. / Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. / I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. / She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. / … In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
The Rabbit Catcher (May 1961) – written after a visit from his lover Assia Wevill (before the affair was known – but obviously suspected), recalling an incident when Ted killed a rabbit; often (rightly in my view) seen as a diatribe against him. It was a place of force – / The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, / Tearing off my voice … The paths narrowed into the hollow. / And the snares almost effaced themselves – Zeros, shutting on nothing, / Set close, like birth pangs. / The absence of shrieks / Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy. / The glassy light was a clear wall, the thickets quiet. / … How they awaited him, those little deaths! / They waited like sweethearts. They excited him. / And we, too had a relationship – / Tight wires between us, / Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring / Sliding shut on some quick thing, / The constriction killing me also.
For A Fatherless Son (September 1962) – described by Clark as an elegy for a lost family; she’s talking to her second child after the separation, also there’s an Australian reference. It’s a short poem and here in its entirety. You will be aware of an absence, presently, / Growing beside you , like a tree, / A death tree, color gone, an Australian gum tree – balding, gelded by lightning – an illusion, / And a sky like a pig’s backside, an utter lack of attention. / But right now you are dumb. / And I love your stupidity, / The blind mirror of it. I look in / And find no face but my own, and you think that’s funny. / It is good for me / To have you grapb my nose, a ladder rung. / One day you may touch what’s wrong / The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush. / Till then your smiles are found money.
Child (January 1963) Duffy concludes her volume with this poem, written in the great outpouring of poems in the last weeks of her life. Clark notes it describes the great distance between wholeness and emptiness measured by the beauty of a child’s eye. It reminds me of Dylan Thomas. Here in its entirety. Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing. / I want to fill it with color and ducks, / The zoo of the new / Whose names you meditate – April snowdrop, Indian pipe / Little /Stalk without wrinkle, Pool in which images / Should be grand and classical / Not this troublous / Wringing of hands, this dark / Ceiling with a star.
Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, Gail Crowther
Never buy a book by it’s cover. I liked this one and loved the title. It also got a good review in the TLS. But having read the biography it didn’t add anything to my knowledge of Sylvia. In fact I learnt more about the impact of these afternoons from Clark rather than Crowther. Plath and Sexton both attended a creative writing class being taught by Robert Lowell after which they repaired to the Ritz with another student George Starbuck to drink – or as Sesxton says in this book, to get loaded.
Quoted in Red Comet, Starbuck recalled hilarious conversations comparing their suicides and talking about their psychiatrists. Despite the title there’s not much evidence of those conversations in this book. Probably because there’s not much evidence available which makes it a problem for someone wanting to write about it.
Clark notes that Sexton was a much wilder figure and rawer poet than Plath – which certainly comes across in this book. Sylvia had learnt the business of writing poems – form and structure – and had practised the craft. She thought Sexton had an enviable casualness that allowed her to write with no inhibitions. Clark believes Sexton was a major influence on Plath’s later, Ariel, poems.
She recordsPlath receiving Sexton’s second published collection All My Pretty Ones in September 1962 and her praise in a letter back: superbly masterful, womanly in the greatest sense, and so blessedly unliterary.
Not that you would know that from reading this book. It gives potted biographies of both poets. I don’t know Sexton’s poetry and am not persuaded by this book to give it a go. She comes across as a very damaged person, wreaking havoc on those around her. Maybe not a fair portrayal.
And maybe this is not a fair portrayal of this book. Perhaps I was exhausted by Red Comet and shouldn’t have embarked on this immediately after.
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