(the following article first appeared in Envoi magazine)
I always expect lips to curl whenever I dare to mention that my favourite poet is Sylvia Plath. There seems to be an expectation that you have to be an intense adolescent girl to really appreciate Plath. Or at least neurotic in some way. It doesn’t help that I discovered Plath when I was (ho hum) an intense adolescent. But let me plead some mitigation. I’d left school at 15 and my exposure to poetry was limited to the "safe" Grammar School staples (Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins). None of it had ever got my juices flowing. And so, bored and cold, one day I found myself wandering into the local library.
I don’t know what drew me towards the poetry section but that’s where I ended up. Knowing nothing of Plath or her work, I picked up a battered copy of "Ariel". The first poem I randomly turned to was "The Night Dances": ("A smile fell in the grass./Irretrievable!"). It rooted me to the spot: my conception of what poetry was became upended and shaken to pieces. Literally: reading this poem was like watching a kaleidoscopic image turning. At first I wasn’t even particularly interested in the sense of the poem: it was the succession of images, the marrying together of words and the sounds they made, that stunned me.
This was poetry: this did what I’d always subconsciously believed poetry should do. Whilst I read it, the world shrank and became, briefly, that poem. This wasn’t poetry to dissect in a stuffy classroom – I didn’t admire it for its technical brilliance, its craft per se. I admired it because it exploded inside me. The words, simply the words. Everything else into a cocked hat: away with you! I’d found what I’d been looking for. Something I could relate to my life, feelings and fears. Something (and this is the crux of the matter, for me) that made me want to write, even if what I produced was only one-hundredth as good as this. I didn’t want the daffodils, the niggardly unrequited loves (though I’d take the narcissi and the spinster girl). I wanted more of this rawness, pain, the brittle beauty, the slang, the references that meant something to me – me being sixteen, bright but unfocussed, rudderless and angry.
And, of course, Wordsworth, Keats and Hopkins were men. Whether Plath herself was a feminist is really beside the point (and it’s unlikely she would have had much truck with the more po-faced elements of feminism). The point is, she did it: proved that poetry isn’t the preserve of men. Proved that women’s experiences can be transmuted into poems with no loss of art (or craft). Of course, she wasn’t the first female poet, but without a doubt she’s the one with the highest profile and reputation. She has those indefinable qualities that make for poetry that lasts. I don’t call them "indefinable" qualities as a cop-out but because they really are impossible to define – which is why you can’t teach someone to be a poet. Sure, you can teach the basics, the techniques and bare bones of the thing, but talent and vision are unteachable.
She does have an undeniable appeal to adolescents in her poems which rage against men, those which appear to dwell on suicide and those in which she makes reference to her sessions of ECT – i.e., extreme experiences. But the poems continue to haunt me now that I’m well past adolescence (and now a wife and a mother). The poems remain relevant because they explore the big themes and our personal hells – all the stuff of which life consists. Generally she deals with life at its extremity, certainly – but it’s the extremes of experience which are so fascinating and stimulating.
What also stuns me about Plath is that her work still sounds completely contemporary and makes many of the younger poets currently writing sound old-fashioned and straight-jacketed. Over-wordy, over-academic. Take a line such as "A man in black with a Meinkampf look" ("Daddy"); or a poem like "Gigolo". Her poems flow like sparkling rain – slangy, snappy – and are not hidebound by the constraints of academia and what is deemed acceptable poetry by the pundits of the day. It’s for these reasons, I think, as much as her subject matter, that makes her appeal to young people. Back to the rightly famous "Daddy" – with its repeated "oo" sound, this hypnotic poem is like a sinister, twisted nursery rhyme. This is rock n roll, as vital and stunning as anything you’d get in a jewel case from HMV.
It’s pointless to try to mould Plath into a feminist. On the "subject" of women she was often loaded with spite and mockery ("Face Lift", "Eavesdropper"). But, for me, what she did was to give me the courage to be a feminist and still be vindictive, jealous…I don’t believe that even a committed feminist has to love the concept of "wimmin" and womanhood wholesale. Or rather, I can be a feminist, in broad terms, but still dislike individual women. We’re not all of a piece, after all. We can even hate our mothers; even as we love them.
But I don’t think even Sylvia Plath would have wished to be a kind of Doris Day woman, all swirly skirts and cookie production. And that all-important fixed on smile, of course. Many of Plath’s poems are certainly not in the voice of Mrs Mop with a can of Mr Sheen. "The Applicant" has a go at the whole concept of the conventional marriage, in which the little woman is simply "it" – "A living doll…", a servant to her husband. Plath may have rejected feminism, but it’s still possible to say that she wrote feminist poems; either way, her work remains relevant – to both genders.
Gender apart, the tone of many of her poems is one of revenge and aggression, rather than submission and subservience. The poems have a toughness, even (dare I say it?) masculine qualities. Even the poems ostensibly about death (and derided, along with anything that smacks of the deathwish) are often about metaphorical deaths – and a death which leads to a rebirth or a renewal: "I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air". I think it’s all too easy to get bogged down in the Plath Myth and all the attendant theorising. It’s perhaps impossible to separate the poetry from what we imagine to be the woman, but I think it’s worth at least attempting to read the poems as they stand, stripped of the biography. Read it simply as remarkable poetry written by a poet who went straight for the heart: "And I/Am the arrow".
Review of "The Journals of Sylvia Plath" (ed. Karen Kukil)
(this review first appeared in Personal Vampires)
At £30 hardback (although the paperback is probably available by now), this is not a cheap book. So is it worth the money? If you’re already a Plath fan, you’ll find it fascinating, but it’s probably not the best introduction to the woman and her work.
An abridged version of the Journals has been available for a number of years (though never, officially, in Britain) but the promiscuous scattering of ellipses throughout the text was always an irritation: what were those passages Ted Hughes thought so inflammatory that the public shouldn’t see them? In actual fact, most of the more controversial passages have already been quoted in various biographies, so there’s little here which comes as a great surprise to anyone familiar with Plath’s biographical background. Most of the other deletions were removed for reasons of dullness or repetition, but this still makes the original editing of the Journals feel like butchery.
Perhaps, though, we should ask ourselves if we should be reading these words at all. Certainly Plath used her personal experiences, and those of people close to her, in a very explicit and brutal fashion, but how far is our understanding of her work illuminated by her teen angst and ruminations about her many dates?
The true Plath fan, though, wants every little bit of her – the full s.p., indeed. We feel entitled to root around in her life and rummage through her thoughts because that is at the heart of Plath’s process whereby she transmuted her life into pure gold words.
This book won’t stem the tidal flow of words written about Plath and about Ted Hughes, but if you take this book in conjunction with "Ariel’s Gift" by Erica Wagner (which examines the genesis of Hughes’ "Birthday Letters", the volume of his poems addressed to Plath) there is a sense of something like closure.
After all the legal wrangles, the demonisation of Hughes and the canonisation of Plath, the real story of their life together is destined to remain a secret. None of the books by or about Plath gives the whole story – only two people knew that – but the effect of readings these books is to accept that the Plath/Hughes relationship was complex and far beyond platitudinous comment.
The Journals are also very useful reading for any (especially any female) aspiring writer in the way it charts Plath’s struggles with her burgeoning talent and fitting it into a shape that suited her. Even if you’re not interested in the biographical details of Plath’s life, it’s a fascinating chronicle of the journey towards becoming a writer.
The Other Sylvia Plath by Tracy Brain
(This review first appeared in Personal Vampires magazine)
How many more books about Sylvia Plath can possibly be written? You could easily fill several bookcases with studies and biographies about her, but this book is a bit different. It genuinely does have something new to say.
Throughout the book Brain attempts to discuss Plath’s work as being entirely separate from anything we think we know about Plath’s life. In this way, and in her re-readings of the poems, she takes us to new levels of meaning, finding evidence to suggest that Plath’s greatest concern was not, in fact, herself. Rather, Brain shows how Plath explored such universal topics as national identity, environmentalism – including the horrors of possible nuclear war – and gender.
What I find exciting about Plath’s work (and which Brain makes explicit by reference to the poems Pheasant and The Rabbit Catcher) is that it does not conform to the stereotypical view that there is a special relationship or alliance between women and the natural world. I’ve always found that view particularly corrosive in the way it seeks to idealise women, and the way in which it gives undue weight to our fertility.
Similarly, Brain points out that in the poem The Surgeon at 2 a.m. Plath doesn’t specify the gender of her surgeon, although the patient is identified as being male. In this way, Plath rejects the easy stereotypes of doctor/patient, power/passivity. By writing about her work in such a measured, non-partisan way, Brain demonstrates that Plath was a far more thoughtful writer than often given credit for, and that her work does have a genuinely feminist element.
The Other Sylvia Plath is a useful corrective to the tendency to see everything Plath wrote as autobiographical and to accept everything Plath wrote as The Truth. Brain has many interesting things to say about the tendency to confuse Plath's art with her biography. Brain flags up Lady Lazarus as being a specific poem about which it’s all too easy to make assumptions about Plath’s personal views and experiences. This one poem has come to be the defining Plath poem – not defining simply of her art, but also of her life. In each case, the assumption is erroneous and reductive.
We should even, according to Brain, treat Plath’s journals and letters sceptically. We should bear in mind that we all make up our lives to some extent, depending on our audience. It’s also true that much of what we do and say and feel is never recorded anywhere, or observed. Nevertheless, I think Brain has to accept, as do we all, that Plath’s biography retains its fascination, its power, and its myth.
Brain is a little po-faced about accepting that there are any known "facts" of Plath’s life, but it's probably helpful to be reminded from time to time that the writing should be allowed to stand on its own, even though it is impossible to forget all we know (or think we know) about Plath's life. If you know the basic biographical details, it takes a tremendous leap of imagination to leave all that behind as you read, in particular, The Bell Jar.
According to Alfred Kazin, The Bell Jar is her "usual facile use of every bit of her experience". Critic Elizabeth Bronfen calls it "a horrific autobiographical novel". But Brain shows us how Plath uses the novel to uncover the myth of 1950s America as being a "melting pot". Rather, any hint of diversity was crushed or treated as "subversive". Such a hypocritical emphasis placed on conformity was – and is – particularly damaging to women.
In her book, Brain also gives useful information about the influence of Plath on Hughes' work, which has often been downplayed, particularly by Hughes scholars who tend to put more emphasis on how Hughes influenced Plath. Some Hughes "experts" fail to mention her at all.
One interesting snippet given in the book is the fact that when Ted Hughes died, he left a sealed trunk of writings (presumably Plath's as well as his) which he's forbidden to be opened until 25 years after his death. Naturally one can't help but wonder if the "missing" journals are in there and perhaps the "lost" draft of Plath's second novel. The story is far from being over.
SYLVIA PLATH: A CRITICAL STUDY by Tim Kendall
What struck me about this book is its balanced approach. The focus is squarely on Plath the working writer rather than Plath the woman; as such, it can seem a little dry and workmanlike, but the distancing between the work and the biographical details is refreshing.
I had the impression that Kendall had no specific agenda, and perhaps it will therefore be passed over as lacking in controversy, since, where Plath is concerned, controversy is rarely far away.
The section of Kendall’s objective study dealing with Plath’s early poetry and her Colossus collection is perhaps the least appealing of the book in its intense focus on matters of poetic technique.
Nevertheless, Plath herself described The Colossus as "That soggy book" and had outgrown it by the time it was published. Kendall makes the point that many of Plath’s earlier poems are stifled by "foregrounded myths". There was an awkward transitional period when Plath’s attempts to write about real life were hampered by a certain staginess, where Plath’s intention shows through too clearly. Kendall suggests that Plath’s solution to this difficulty of how to form a bridge between artifice and real life was not to ditch the poetic techniques she understood so well, but to disguise them.
Kendall makes the important point that, "..critical appreciation of her work has tended to rely on thematic approaches at the expense of more formal analysis". Although this is true, such an approach is understandable given the startling subject matter of much of her work.
Kendall does go along with the general view that the driving force behind her subsequent work was "her own psychological stress", but repudiates the charge too often laid at Plath’s door of "crude egotism", explaining clearly and calmly that this is to misread Plath.
The book devotes a chapter to the issue of gender and feminist approaches to Plath’s work. I particularly enjoyed the way Kendall makes the point that it is futile to attempt to seek the "real" Plath. Various critics have tried to suggest that the "real" Plath is in the Journals but not Letters Home, for example. Kendall’s view is the much more sensible one that all Plath’s writings present facets of her identity. Plath was always interested in the idea of doubles and, like many people, was concerned with trying to fit in. This need to fit in, though, is true for people generally, not just women.
As Kendall says of The Bell Jar’s protagonist, Esther’s "crisis of identity…does not relate purely to feminism"; although, of course, as a woman in 1950s America Plath would have been very conscious of the way women were expected to conform. To extent, Plath sought this conformation, but at the same time felt "a profound dissatisfaction with such roles". These are important issues to bear in mind when trying to decide (probably fruitlessly) whether or not Plath’s work can be said to be "feminist".
The author takes a useful look at the genesis of the poems that found their way into Ariel, dismissing the idea often proposed that such poems were the result what one might call "automatic writing". Instead, Kendall shows how they were intricately crafted, sometimes laboriously so, draft after draft.
Inspiration is important to the poet, but it is unfair not to recognise the craft and sheer effort that go into the making of a good poem.
Though we speak of "the Ariel poems", it’s not strictly correct to do so. The manuscript file left by Plath was not necessarily the final version she would have chosen; with The Colossus she kept re-arranging the order and the poems right up to publication; in any case, the published version is Ted Hughes’ selection, not Plath’s.
We know from the Journals that Plath had read Freud. At one point she makes the comment, "I am the victim, rather than the analyst". In her poetry, though, her strategy is to become both.
The poem Daddy in particular has often been criticised, not just for its Holocaust imagery but also for the way Plath repeats certain words and phrases. The suspicion has been that this was either a poetic tic, or a cold-blooded technique, an example of how Plath used her craft at the expense of emotion.
Kendall, however, makes an important point about the Freudian idea of acting out repressed memories. The repetition of words and phrases by Plath is merely an extension of the repetition of acting out, over and over – in this case, the father figure who has to be killed again and again. Although he is dead, the memory of him isn’t properly in the past, it remains a "contemporary experience".
Daddy and similarly high-pitched poems such as Lady Lazarus are examples of poems that are performances. The phrase (in Lady Lazarus) "Dying/Is an art" is shocking, but the whole poem is very conscious of being staged in front of an audience. As Plath would have known, Freud himself had made the connection between pleasure and pain, the fact that (in staged drama, for instance) we find tragedy enjoyable. Plath plays on this fact in her poetry; although conscious of what she was doing, it doesn’t follow that there is no genuine feeling behind the poem.
On the thorny question of reading biographical details into Plath’s work, Kendall makes a couple of useful points. Even Ted Hughes, Kendall reminds us, thought Plath’s poems had a large amount of autobiographical content, as evidenced by his decision to cut poems from Ariel because he deemed them too personal, and "would have cut out others if I’d thought they would ever be decoded." Kendall goes so far as to concede that some of the poems "seem deliberately to invite…[a] code-breaking interpretation", particularly those which deal with the subjects of betrayal and adultery.
But how much do we need to know? And how much are we entitled to know? Although it’s not by any means unusual for a poet to use personal experience as a starting point, in order to transmute it into poetry it must be "metamorphosed into myth". It is perhaps foolish to describe any poet as "confessional", and in Plath’s case she herself stated that "I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences". Perhaps we should ask ourselves what we gain by reading a poem as autobiographical, and if the poem would strike us with the same force if we knew nothing about its author.
One of the most striking sections of this book is Kendall’s analysis of Plath’s last poems. These, he shows, are bleaker than the fiery Ariel-period poems. They tend towards obscurity in many cases but their brevity and compactness makes them, according to Kendall, possibly her finest achievements. However, these poems have none of Plath’s earlier urgency. The hope of rebirth has dissipated. The message of these final works is that death is the end, and not a route to any kind of rebirth.
The note of desolation they strike is discomfiting, but I’m grateful to Kendall for discussing these poems, often passed over because considered too inscrutable.
Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study constitutes an unspectacular but solid achievement. It is highly recommended for anyone who’s been seduced by Plath’s extraordinary poems.
SYLVIA PLATH LINKS
http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/ - A discussion forum. Also includes external links and suggested books, etc.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/plath.htm Analyses of a selection of Plath’s poems from the Modern American Poetry database.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/06/01/plath2/index.html Very interesting article by Kate Moses positing the theory that a major contributory factor to Plath's suicide was severe PMS - not as wild a claim as that might sound if you read the article in full