Her letters and journals come at you headlong, a frantic avalanche of passion and intuition and observation that, after several pages, seems to congeal into a solid block of tumultuous feeling. A great, stark, bloody play acting itself out over and over again behind the sunny facade of our daily rituals, birth, marriage, death, behind parents and schools and beds and tables of food: the dark, cruel murderous shades, the demon-animals, the Hungers, which Sylvia Plath wrote on Jan. 3, 1959, four years before gassing herself to death in a London flat, begins to blur into thedarkcruelmurderousshadesthedemonanimals . . .
Something else is coming headlong as well: a wodge of new Plath-related material. There’s a book about her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes (“Her Husband” by Diane Middlebrook); a memoir by a Plath confidant (“Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath” by Jillian Bender); an off-Broadway play that soon moves to London (“Edge” by Paul Alexander) and a film opening Oct. 24 in Chicago (“Sylvia,” starring Gwyneth Paltrow).
These dramatizations of Plath’s life join an already formidable body of work capitalizing on our ferocious fascination with her, including the novel “Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath” (2003) by Kate Moses. Plath has become the James Dean of modern literature: intriguing because she died young (she was 30 at the time of her suicide), the work vastly overshadowed by the myth, apparently doomed to be more pop-culture icon than respected artist.
Is the Plath legend — the tortured life, the ghastly death — edging out the poetry?
“Like [Virginia] Woolf, like any artist who commits suicide, all the work is read as a precursor to the suicide,” laments Susan Van Dyne, a professor of women’s studies at Smith College, Plath’s alma mater. “That’s the biggest disservice one can do to Plath.
“You can’t do without the biography,” Van Dyne adds, “but you can’t let the life lead the poems.”
In Plath’s case, it was more than the suicide that tends to distract readers from poetry collections such as “The Colossus” (1962) and “Ariel” (1965). Also titillating was her stormy marriage to Hughes, the handsome, brooding Heathcliffian figure who had abandoned her and their two young children shortly before Plath’s death, to take up with a new lover; and the fact that Plath seemed to embody the vibrant promise of a new generation of women, just emerging from the yoke of traditional female roles of the 1950s. Educated at elite colleges — Smith and Cambridge University — and the recipient of numerous literary prizes, she was the proverbial golden girl. Her descent into severe psychiatric distress and ultimately a self-inflicted end has the poignant allure of early promise fallen to ash.
Such drama, such pathos, have understandably tempted readers to skip over those challenging, densely clotted poems and get right to the juicy stuff.
Lynda Bundtzen, an English professor at Williams College and author of “The Other Ariel” (2001) a book about Plath’s muses, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to hand those poems over to students with the name stripped off? But it’s not possible with Plath. Not anymore. Not with all the information that’s out there.” Included in that information is new evidence, discussed in Budtzen’s book, that the order of the poems in the posthumously published “Ariel” was not as Plath had desired.
Jeredith Merrin, an English professor at Ohio State University who teaches Plath’s work, is impatient nonetheless with those who put the poet’s life ahead of her work. “Forget the `Was she a shrewish wife, was Ted Hughes a demon husband?’ . Forget the `Was she mousy or a blond bombshell?’ We wouldn’t be asking about these things — and there wouldn’t be a movie coming out with Gwyneth Paltrow, either — unless there was Plath’s poetry.
“Everyone likes to know a little biography of any writer, and Plath’s work does tease us into biographical speculation,” Merrin says. “But poetry is not memoir.”
However, Karen Kukil, curator of the Plath archives at Smith College, believes the mass of biographical material available about Plath is a helpful bridge. “Even people who get interested in her through the biography end up going to the poems,” she says. “The biography does lead to the poetry.”
In her own hand
Plath’s archives — which include manuscripts of her poems and of “The Bell Jar,” her only published novel, along with journals, letters and books from Plath’s library, complete with her underlinings and scribbled marginalia — are divided between Smith and the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind. Having work written in Plath’s own hand serves as a corrective to the distortions promulgated by some of the poet’s biographers, Kukil believes.
“We’ve had so much myth about her. It’s important to have these physical objects. She was a real person. She really lived.”
And she wrote poems that, even four decades after her death, possess a staccato urgency and harsh, haunting beauty. They never sound dated. They are written in a sort of emotional Morse Code; a great deal of anguish and exultation is packed into a single word or a single image. Plath wasn’t afraid to come across as angry, as worlds away from the good little girl who was raised in a nice home and trained to be a smiling wife: “I walk in a ring,/A groove of old faults, deep and bitter,” she wrote in a 1962 poem titled “Event.”
Her imagery is shatteringly apt, with indelible portraits emerging from stark words: “The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve,/On their blotter of fog the trees/Seem a botanical drawing — / Memories growing, ring on ring,/A series of weddings” she wrote in “Winter Trees” (1962).
Her most famous poems, “Daddy” and “Medusa,” both written in 1962, are also among her bleakest and bitterest, ringed by a halo of resentment. Biographical critics have had a field day with these two; “Daddy” seems to be addressed to Plath’s German-born father, Otto Plath, who died when she was nine, and “Medusa” to her mother, Aurelia Plath, who raised her. “Medusa” includes this fed-up sigh: “In any case, you are always there,/Tremulous breath at the end of my line.” And “Daddy” ends with a brittle kiss-off: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
Students, Van Dyne says, find Plath’s poems difficult but worth the struggle to understand them — once she can “wrestle them away” from the lure of the biography, she adds. “They’re always more interested in the tragic myth. It’s a powerful romantic myth that seems to authenticate the writing in some way. The suffering and the death.”
So just how good is Plath’s work? According to Alexander, who wrote a 1991 biography of Plath (“Rough Magic”) before his one-woman play “Edge,” she is without peer. “We’re still talking about her not because of the life she lived, but because of the poetry she wrote,” he declares. “In American literature, her face is on Mount Rushmore. She’s the 20th Century’s Emily Dickinson.”
Alexander, who has yet to see the movie “Sylvia,” is concerned about how it may sensationalize Plath’s life, he says. “She was a major writer, and that’s why her life is interesting. But that’s what gets lost in the shuffle, especially when Hollywood gets involved.”
Yet it is probably the movie, more than any other entity, that has led to what appears to be a Plath renaissance in popular culture, says Middlebrook, whose book on Hughes will be published Monday.
“The movie exerts the gravitational pull in the Sylvia Plath field,” says Middlebrook, retired Stanford University English professor who also published a biography of Anne Sexton, a poet who knew Plath.
Life, poetry can go together
Middlebrook sees no conflict between learning about Plath’s life and appreciating her work. “Why do we assume that there is some kind of `pure’ experience of a poem? To privilege the de-contextualizion is just one critical preference,” she says. To read with an author’s biography in mind — to know the life story — can energize a poem as much as distort it, Middlebrook claims.
“I taught Sylvia Plath’s poetry for several years. I realized that the only way into her poems is to sense the emotional arc in them. There is an emotion traveling through them. That’s what organizes the poem.” Tracing the origin of Plath’s emotions, the ones that ultimately manifest themselves in her poems, helps readers, Middlebrook believes. “It [the poetry] really is hard stuff. But when people work on it together, in goodwill, they really will come out with lots of insights.”
Bundtzen reports that she also has to “restrain” her students from talking only about the poet’s biography. But she understands the temptation.
“I think it’s difficult to read it [Plath’s work] apart from the biography. We’re not just content to see the work. We want the whole thing,” she says. “Biography and writing are complicated. And I’m not sure I see the intrinsic value of separating the poems from the life.” So-called “new criticism” — a literary trend in the early 20th Century that advocated reading poems apart from any biographical considerations, as if poems were neutral artifacts and not reflections of authors’ perspectives and experiences — is “not the only way to explicate poems and works of art,” she adds.
“I am teaching Plath in my literature by women course and I think it’s important to know that she wrote `Daddy’ on Oct. 12, the anniversary of her father’s leg amputation in 1940. Her poem is in many ways a figurative amputation of her father from her life,” she says. “And she wrote her beekeeping poems during the week Ted Hughes was leaving her. That is important biographical information that doesn’t `take over’ the poem.”
Indeed, the biographical elements — the daily realities against which Plath rubbed, from dishes in the sink to society’s expectations for women — may illuminate as much as they sensationalize, Van Dyne says. “You have to embed her in her historical moment. Women’s roles were in flux. She rebelled against some of the gender expectations. She wanted sexual freedom, and she also wanted a husband and children and a professional career.”
Reinforcing myth
Yet Van Dyne, too, is “dreading” the new film, she admits. “I think that, like `The Hours’ [the 2002 film about Virginia Woolf], it will be framed by the suicide. It will reinforce the myth I’m trying hard to dismantle.”
That myth, she adds is the idea that Plath was exclusively a tragic figure whose suicide was inevitable. To the contrary, Van Dyne says, “I see the art as absolutely working to counter depression and loneliness.”
The tug-of-war between those with competing views of Plath continues, of course, because scholars have both the poems and the biographical scaffolding upon which they seem to have been erected. Indeed, in her 1993 New Yorker essay, “The Silent Woman,” that later became a book, Janet Malcolm argues that “the Plath biographical situation” is “a kind of allegory of the problem of biography in general.”
The battle between Plath and Hughes — was she the wronged wife or was he the picked-on husband? — rages on, minus the principles themselves. (Hughes, who became British Poet Laureate, died in 1998). The biographers arrange themselves on either side, each brandishing the poems as evidence: He did this. Well, she did that.
The film version of Plath’s life is likely to bolster both sides of the debate. In an electric performance, Paltrow plays the beautiful, deeply troubled Plath whose demons make her a great artist — and an impossible partner. But Hughes (Daniel Craig) doesn’t help matters with his chronic infidelities.
The battles seem to echo fights that Plath herself enacted in her lifetime, fights about women’s roles and responsibilities, about the ambiguities of love, about the importance of poetry, about the inexorable pull of family. (A further family wrinkle in matters Plathian: Blythe Danner, Paltrow’s mother, plays Aurelia Plath in “Sylvia.”)
“You need the conflict to make a great poem,” Merrin says.
Perhaps the conflict over Plath, and over the seemingly endless retellings of her tragic life story in books and movies and plays and graduate seminars, is what keeps the work energized and relevant.
Perhaps the impulse to peer into the nooks and crannies of her private life and the darkest parts of her psyche is what keeps her work in the public eye.
Perhaps her tragic death, that is, keeps her alive in the only way that may have mattered to her: on the page.
Excerpts from Syliva Plath’s poems
Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool,
fixed stars
Govern a life.
— “Words”
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
— “Ariel”
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones
of the landing.
— “The Colossus”
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
— “Edge”
